I'm just giving you Plato's take on the subject

OK. He was a smart person. So? Lots of people who are just as smart as he was disagree with quite a bit of what he had to say.

one of the greatest western philosophers

He was great for his time. In the 24 centuries since his time, we've learned a thing or two that he didn't know.

OK, but if I don't see those reasons . . . ?

You might believe it is other than it seems because you see reasons that it is NOT as it seems.

Seeming does not make it so.

Why should I believe it is other than as it seems?

"Is this really the Catholic position on evolution by natural selection?"

No. John Paul addressed the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences on the subject in 1996. It can be found here:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp961022.htm

The post about it being evil sounds more like a reference to "social darwinism", Nietzsche, eugenics and the Nazi "solution", or something along those lines?

So it is (in my opinion) a case of the pot calling the kettle black to criticize those who are not Catholic for having the chutzpah to say, when they look at the world, "This is not the way an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God would have created the world."

Many people want to rationalize the issue away, and it is hard to blame them. But folks like that are no comfort when tragedy strikes. On the other hand, "bad stuff happens but it is irredeemable and meaningless" is no great comfort either.
You might enjoy David B Harts "The Doors of the Sea", it is an extended rant against Christians who try to defang evil; it came out his arguments with other writers after the Indonesian tsunami.
Jesus himself says regarding divorce (one of the most painful things to have hit our family in the last 20 years) "because of the hardness of your hearts this was permitted by Moses, but it was not this way from the beginning". So he himself acknowledged that things now are not what they are supposed to be.

"He spends page after page explaining the theorem and providing examples of how he is using it."

"Page after page" is exactly why it is a "club meant to frighten": Bayes is no more relevant to the question than is Pythagoras or Toroidal Topology or the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. I did find the author a little over the top with the criticisms of Carrier, but mostly when he turned Carrier's own blather back on Carrier himself, eg., "set aside ignoramuses."

How much do you know about the concepts of wu wei and wei wu wei ? There is a lot more to it than "everything is nothing and nothing is everything".

I find that wei wu wei is highly resonant with the concept of completely humble, self-giving love that Jesus was trying to illustrate with his own life, and also very resonant with the idea of gratuitous creation ex nihilo. You can come to your own conclusions, but I don't think I'm projecting that. If I am projecting it, I am at least doing so after a good deal of thought and learning about both Christianity and Taoism.