The cognitive reflection test could be testing for general intelligence.
Er... how incompetent do you think these researchers are? That is one of the most obvious possible confounds. Of course they controlled for intelligence (and did).
If you control by IQ you still aren't controlling by general intelligence as the IQ test is somewhat noisy / imprecise.
Immediate backtracking, I see.
The intuitive people, i think, simply don't reflect enough
Non-reflective people simply don't reflect enough! I see.
Er... how incompetent do you think these researchers are?
You need to control for intelligence, all you have is IQ test which is intelligence measured with some errors (edit: to be precise, the correlation between IQ test score and "general intelligence" is presumed to be around 0.8 or less), do I need to spell it out for you that controlling for something measured with an error does not result in perfect controls? The level of competence in psychology is pretty low.
tl;dr; of course they didn't control for intelligence. They controlled for IQ,...
"Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism":
Caldwell-Harris et al 2011.
Mostly as one would expect, although I am troubled that the second survey did not find any difference in agnostics, only the other categories.
See also: "How to be deader than dead".