Michael Tooley is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has been on faculty since 1992. He received his BA from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Princeton University in 1968.

Before coming to Colorado, Tooley spent many years in Australia, holding two research appointments at the Australian National University and the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, served as President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy in 1983–84, and as President of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in 2010–11.

His research spans metaphysics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and ethics. His books include Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford, 1997), Knowledge of God (with Alvin Plantinga, Blackwell, 2008), The Problem of Evil (Cambridge, 2019), and most recently Causation: A Defense of a Non-Reductionist Approach (Oxford, 2026).