After graduating from the humanistic high school at Fulda, he studied philosophy and theology at universities in Frankfurt/Main, Heidelberg, and Munich, with, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dieter Henrich, Hermann Krings, Robert Spaemann, Michael Theunissen, Ernst Tugendhat and Heinrich Fries, Alois Grillmeier, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Rahner, Trutz Rendtorff and Eugen Biser, under whose direction he completed a summa cum laude dissertation on the thinking of Ernst Troeltsch.
In January 1986 he accepted a position at the Department of Religion and Philosophy of what is now Hong Kong Baptist University.
In 1991 Becker was asked to establish Hong Kong's first Centre for Applied Ethics and become its founding director; in 1992, he was elected as an Ordinary Member to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
From 1996-2004, he served on the Hong Kong Government's Council on Human Reproductive Technology, initially as a member, then as the chairman of its Ethics Committee.
Since 2004 he is a regular visiting professor at the Graduate School of Philosophy and Religion, Assumption University of Thailand, Bangkok.