Yeah, like you, I disagree with that statement, and my disagreement rests on strong shoulders: Both the Ramban and the Rambam, among other Spanish luminaries, had conceptions of divine providence that acknowledged the role of coincidence. The perfect rebuttal, however, to there are no coincidences, is not found in Jewish books, but in Saturday, Ian McEwan's latest:
"The [burning] plane emerges from the trees, crosses a gap and disappears behind the Post Office Tower. If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he could play with the idea that he's been summoned; that having woken in an unusual state of mind, and gone to the window for no reason, he should acknowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence which wants to show or tell him something of significance. But a city of its nature cultivates insomniacs; it is itself a sleepless entity whose wires never stop singing; among so many millions there are bound to be people staring out of windows when normally they would be asleep. And not the same people every night. That it should be him and not someone else is an arbitrary matter. A simple anthropic principle is involved. The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem or an idea of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.
And such reasoning may have caused the fire on the plane. A man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe. Among the terrified passengers many might be praying (another problem of reference) to their own god for intercession. And if there are to be deaths, the very god who ordained them will soon be funereally petitioned for comfort. Perowne regards this is a matter for wonder, a human complication beyond the reach of morals. From it there spring, alongside the unreason and slaughter, decent people and good deeds, beautiful cathedrals, mosques, cantatas, poetry.
