Pretty much all the stories found within religious books, certainly within the bible, will have a basis in actual events that happened. I have no doubt that, at some point a few thousand years ago, there was a major flood event in the middle eastern area. Floods are commonplace, we get them yearly in the UK, and the same seems to be the case for Europe, and elsewhere. However that doesn't mean that I accept the premise that there was a man called Noah who had a premonition, built a boat, filled it with a load of animals, and road out the flood whilst those around him died. Maybe there's a kernel of truth to some of it, it's feasible that a farmer/fisherman saw the flood waters were getting bad, happened to have a decent sized boat to hand, shoved his family and livestock on it, and survived the flood. The same with other stories, take Lazarus for example. Dead man risen. But was he really? Given our far greater understanding of the human body, and medicine/disease these days is it really likely this happened? Maybe he wasn't actually dead in the first place, he could have been in a coma, how accurate were the methods for telling if someone was dead thousands of years ago? You hear stories of people waking up in morgues from time to time so, even now, we don't always get it right.
