[wl]

"Higher power" is an Alcoholics Anonymous thing, which has been rationalized by the group to include atheism and agnosticism, although not all atheists and agnostics are on board with that (Cf. Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Rational Recovery). In Freemasonry, you're looking for the "Supreme Being," the God of "that religion in which all men agree" which is an attempt at universalism from a 18th century cultural Christian perspective. While that concept has been harmonized with Buddhism, Hinduism, various Neopaganisms, and many other religions that aren't a natural fit, atheism remains explicitly called out as something that's incompatible in the ritual used in the Anglo-American Masonic tradition. Adogmatic or Liberal Freemasonry admits atheists (and sometimes women!), but they're much fewer in number outside Latin America and Continental Europe and unrecognized by the larger Anglo-American faction.

[motohagiography]

The disqualification of atheism is because it is a materialist anti-belief, where the necessary condition is that any faith of others is wrong, which makes it the essence of choosing to have an irreconcilable difference. They literally identify as adversaries to the faithful.

If you've ever seen a dog scramble to take food and wolf it down without a sense of consequences because the food is the end in itself, materialism is the human version of that but for power. Without a shared abstraction for morality, there is no basis of trust or responsibility to expose anything valuable to them. In this sense, belief in a supreme being is a much more rational position than its critics apprehend.