Robert M. Adams was born on 8 September 1937. He held a teaching post at the University of Michigan from 1968 to 1972. In 1972 he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was eventually promoted to professor of philosophy, before taking a post at Yale University in 1993. He retired from Yale in 2003 and is currently a fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. He gave the 1998-99 Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is married to Marilyn McCord Adams.

His publications include The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (1987), Integrity and Conscience (1998), and Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (2002).