If by fate you mean something is inevitablly going to happen, such as marrying someone in particular or ending up in a certain position, then I do not believe in fate.
A hundred years ago it would have been difficult to argue against fate.
If you could know where every atom in the Universe was and the forces acting upon them you could tell how they would all interact in the next 5 seconds in the next 5 million years.
OK nobody could do that but it's the principal - the Universe was thought to be deterministic. What would happen was fixed by what had happened - cause and effect until the end of time - fate!
Then two important discoveries occurred one was quantum mechanics which showed how subatomic events were truely random and something called non-linear dynamics (Chaos theory) this showed how large things could be truely random.
So no there are random things that affect almost everything around us and that messes up fate.
Of course looking back it's tempting to think we see patterns and believe in fate but we can't see the patterns that didn't happen.
We will almost certainly never meet - if we did it might be tempting to see it as fate - but we won't so we never think of it that way
If by fate you mean that certain things we have no control on like for example you are driving as you would all the time with care and still all of a sudden something happens and you have a crash or things like in other words you couldn�t have predicted. Yes that happens and is known or described as fate.
As human we have control over certain things, and on others we may or do not have control. That is known as fate.
I'm not sure I'm swayed one way or another. The human brain looks for patterns and to me fate is a pattern that you can only see with hindsight so I can look back on my life thus far and think if I hadn't done that then I wouldn't have met this person or such and such wouldn't have happened. However I only really do that for nice things that come out of bad so perhaps it's less fate and more me looking for the good in any given situation.
Life does often have a strange way of working out though in my experience.
If fate is the things that happen outside of our control then we create our own destiny by the decisions we make and how we deal with those fateful things when they arise.
I like to think I have some control over my life. The idea that our destiny is set is scary. If that were the case, there would be no point in doing ANYTHING. You might as well stay in bed and wait to die.
Imagine you life as a very complicated woven rug you start at the beginning of a thread and go through many twists and turns making many different choices but ending at the same place.....the end of the thread :)