Must a Cause be Really Related to its Effects?: The Analogy between Divine and Libertarian Agent Causality

According to a classical teaching, God is not really related to creatures even by virtue of creating them. Some have objected that this teaching makes unintelligible the claim that God causally accounts for the universe, since God would be the same whether the universe existed or not. I defend the classical teaching, showing how the doctrine is implied by a popular cosmological argument, showing that the objection to it would also rule out libertarian agent causality, and showing that the objection rests on an account of causality and sufficient reason that we have good reason to reject.