Are art and science at odds with one another?

Richard Dawkins wrote the book Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998. The title refers to an accusation made by poet John Keats to Isaac Newton on learning of Newton’s experiments with prisms. The purpose of the book was to answer those who asked how he could live with himself. Dawkins earlier wrote The Selfish Gene, which presents the grim view that our bodies are just part of an elaborate scheme devised by our genetic material whose sole purpose is to perpetuate that genetic material.

Is there a basic tension between art and science? How can we speak of birds singing because they are happy after learning that they sing to attract mates and defend territories? How can we speak of trees reaching out to God when we know that they grow tall in order to compete for sunight?

I once heard about an experiment that was run to determine why a hen that is defending its nest refrains from attacking its chicks. The poetic view is that she would never attack her own children. The experimenters conjectured that the peeping sounds made by the chicks disarmed their mother’s attack response. The experimenters plugged the ears of the hens and sure enough they attacked the chicks along with everything else. Am I any better off for knowing this? I think I will stick with the poetic view.