OK, sure, there are what the insurance company calls "Acts of God": a branch of what seemed to be a perfectly healthy tree falls on your garage in a wind storm, damaging the roof. And there are acts of nature: a herd of little burrowing animals attacks your newly planted rose bushes overnight, leaving nothing but holes and a few scattered leaves behind (they pull them into their burrows root first).

The kinds of accidents I don't believe in have a human component, most often traceable to a lack of awareness, not being in the present, or to a (usually) unacknowledged self-defeatist desire.

So the car crossing the intersection doesn't stop for the red light (you have the green)--if you were maintaining alert awareness, you would have seen that he wasn't slowing down and you would have taken appropriate action. True, sometimes the only appropriate action is to "brake and hold" as we tell trainees, but the accident then becomes a decision to take (or not take) action, not something that happens out of the blue.

Think about it, about how many "accidents" involve lack of in-the-moment awareness, lack of preparation, lack of appropriate choice(s).

Darned few--or none--would be my estimate.

By the way, this is a topic of major argument between N and me. He sees himself as the innocent victim. For instance, when he was kneeling on the edge of the bed (feet under his butt) to pour a glass of water, and fell off head first, breaking a collar bone and two ribs, according to him, it was an accident, due to poor design of the bed. He wanted to sue the manufacturers and the VA. Not his fault at all, but an accident. I rest my case.