How are you (and they) defining faith? If faith is the feeling of certainty in a specific belief, then the belief must come first, of course.
But if faith is a general tendency to believe in things for which there is no evidence (not including personal experience or authoritative assurance), belief follows faith. It's not necessarily blind faith unless it means believing everything (or at least everything stated by a particular authority)
I suspect you're asking the question because people frequently use the same word in those two contexts without making it clear what they mean.
In my opinion both forms of faith fall short of true validation of a belief. The former is too reliant on feelings which can very easily be misleading, and the latter inhibits questioning of suggestions which could very possibly be damaging.
|