I can't speak with authority on his mental state at the time, but I was a participant in the online conversation during which his transition occurred, and I would say that it seemed like a click moment. He had already been grappling with religious issues and attempting to reconcile them in a rational way, and had started to make a headway on the sequences, and in the course of that conversation, he seemed to realize that there were simple and obvious reasons why the approach he had been taking didn't make sense, that the mistakes were correctable, and that by making a generalized effort to recognize and avoid those sort of mistakes, he could make his reasoning more correct.

He already had the relevant information, but the connection was a relatively sudden event.

Edit: wrote this after seeing Raw Power's comment in the recent comments bar without noticing the date of the comment he was responding to. I interpreted it as a question to Raw Power.