I discuss Gödel's philosophical position on the nature of time. I describe Gödel's model, which contains closed time-like curves allowing us to take a journey into our future and arrive in our past, and show how it is incompatible with presentism. I do not discuss the well-known implications of this for time travel, but focus on Gödel's subtler ‘modal’ argument. I discuss various ways of rejecting this argument and show that the conclusion that presentists must draw is that tense is not an essential feature of it: whether time is presentist or tenseless is an entirely contingent matter. I conclude by considering the extent to which metaphysics can tell us about the nature of time as it actually is.
Keywords: Gödel, Einstein, general relativity, closed time-like curves, modal argument, presentism, essential properties, contingent metaphysics