Classical theism's account of evil has always had to explain how an all powerful, all good God permits genuine suffering, and every standard answer, greater goods, free will, mystery beyond human comprehension, has to reconcile suffering with a God who could, by simple decree, have prevented it and chose the world that includes it anyway. Process theology, built on Whitehead's metaphysics, answers differently by changing what kind of power God is said to have in the first place. On this account God does not coerce outcomes into being by unilateral decree; God acts by persuasion, offering each momentary event of experience, human, animal or otherwise, a lure toward the richest and most valuable possibility available to it, a possibility the event is genuinely free to actualize or refuse. Suffering, on this account, is not something God permits from a position of untouched power but something that happens within a world God cannot simply overrule, because coercive, unilateral power of that kind is not among the kinds of power process metaphysics allows anything, God included, to have. What God offers instead, in Whitehead's phrase, is the consequent nature that takes every actual event, the achieved joy and the achieved suffering alike, back into the divine experience, so nothing that happens is lost or unfelt even where it could not be prevented. Critics argue this solves the problem of evil only by giving up the strong claim to omnipotence classical theism was built to defend; process theologians answer that the claim was never coherent to begin with.