William P. Alston was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 29 November 1921 to Eunice Schoolfield and William Alston. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, and studied music at Centenary College. While serving in the US Army in the Second World War (1942–6), he read philosophy extensively. He earned his PhD in 1951 from the University of Chicago; Alston's dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead was written under the direction of Charles Hartshorne. He held appointments at the University of Michigan (1949–71), Rutgers University (1971–6), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1976–80), and Syracuse University (1980–92). Since 1992, he has been Professor Emeritus at Syracuse, where he continued to teach until 2000. During his career, Alston received many honours. He contributed significantly to metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language, psychology and religion.

One will not find a synoptic philosophy of religion in Alston's work, nor much natural theology, although he had an abiding appreciation for both. Rather, one finds historically informed treatments of various problems that arise within theistic religions generally and Christianity specifically, treatments enriched by the tools of analytic philosophy. Alston has been at the forefront of the recent trend for Anglo-American Christian philosophers to take more seriously the Augustinian motto, ‘faith seeking understanding’. (He was raised a Methodist and, through various ups and downs and ins and outs, returned to the Church to stay in the mid-1970s.