Is Omphalism ad hoc?

https://randalrauser.com/2020/03/would-it-be-deceptive-if-god-created-a-young-world-with-apparent-age/

Gosse’s apparent age thesis never won much support for one good reason: it is baldly ad hoc. In other words, the apparent age supposition is offered only to explain away the great age of the earth. Thus, there is no independent reason to adopt the thesis.

I believe that's incorrect. Although it's been many years since I read him, Gosse's argument, as I recall, is that nature is cyclical, so that absolute creation must initiate creation at some point in the ongoing cycle, as if the cycle is already in process. There is no logical place to break into the cycle. It could be further into the cycle or earlier in the cycle. So any entry point will be arbitrary. To exist at all, the world must come into being at some stage in the cycle. 

Now, you can try to challenge the presupposition of Gosse's argument, but it's not ad hoc in the sense of having no independent reason for its adoption. Or you might allege that it's an ad hoc solution to salvage YEC chronology. That it was only motivated with that in mind. But the theory must be assessed on the merits, because it is a philosophically significant proposal. 

Rauser follows this up with a useful comparison: 

And what about the fact that colors are not in the things we perceive but rather are only in our minds? That firetruck isn’t “red”, for example. Rather, the fire truck has the dispositional property that produces a quale in my mind when I see it and I call that experience “red”. But there are no colors, as such, in nature. There are only dispositional properties to produce particular types of subjective experiences in conscious perceivers.

We could go on enumerating such examples of nature misleading us.

Suffice it to say, however, that it would be grossly overreaching to conclude that God was thereby deceiving people by creating the world with the actual characteristics that we have discovered it to have. Mutatis mutandis, it could well be that the universe appears to be old when, in fact, it is not so at all. It hardly follows that God would thereby be deceiving us.

To be sure, it might still be the case that God is deceiving us. That would depend on the divine intent in creating the world as God created it. But we can at least conclude that even if God created a young universe with the appearance of great age, it does not follow that God’s action was thereby deceptive.